Khamissa, a 70-year-old Sudanese grandmother living in Chad, walked for two days to track down her orphaned grandchildren after their mother was killed. Zeinab, a 34-year-old from South Darfur, escaped airstrikes before eventually finding refuge in Ethiopia. Her family is now spread across seven different countries, and she fears she may never see them again. A 16-year-old from Khartoum, Ahmad, makes money to support his family by cleaning up debris in a local park, where he has found the remains of over 15 human bodies. He has lost contact with five of his six brothers, and he does not know if they are still alive. These are just a few stories that have come out of the Sudanese Civil War, a conflict that has engulfed the nation with hardships no human deserves to experience.
Despite the staggering loss of innocent lives, Sudan’s current crisis has drawn little attention from Western leaders and news outlets. Many Americans generally know about the Russo-Ukrainian War and the conflict in Gaza, but do not know about the multi-year Sudanese Civil War that has caused the near collapse of the nation and the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. In 2023, a tense struggle for power broke out into a full-fledged civil war that has accounted for thousands of deaths just this past year. According to ABC, in 2024, USAID supplied 44% of humanitarian aid to Sudan. Now, the Trump administration’s elimination of the program leaves Sudanese people even more vulnerable, reducing aid by 85%. This has major implications, with an estimated 14 million people expected to die as a result, a third of them children under the age of five. It is our obligation to raise awareness of the crisis in order to garner more support and aid for the people of Sudan.
Sudan’s crisis has been years in the making. In 2019, the military—also known as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF)—ousted president Omar al-Bashir due to public protests of the deteriorating economy and increasing cost of living. The coup ended a 25-year reign that included arrest warrants for multiple charges of genocide. Toward the end of his reign, al-Bashir appointed Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, as head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The RSF was an unofficial militia force that was deployed in 2013 to put down rebels in the War in Darfur, a western region that has been a site of humanitarian crisis since 2003.
After the 2019 regime change, there were originally plans to create a joint civilian-military government that would hold elections in 2023. These elections never happened, as the military staged another government coup, this time led by Hemedti and Sudanese SAF leader General Abdel Fattah. They successfully gained power over the nation, but disagreements over multiple topics, such as integrating the RSF into the army and the future makeup of the government, led to fighting between the SAF and RSF breaking out in 2023. Since then, fighting has continued to escalate to horrific heights, and a lack of humanitarian aid, paired with the numerous war crimes committed from both sides, has created unbearable conditions for Sudanese civilians.
Photo of humanitarian aid by Mathurin NAPOLY
In the U.S., there has been minimal media coverage about the crisis in Sudan. 12 million Sudanese people have been displaced and 30.4 million civilians are in need of humanitarian aid, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC). According to BBC, over 150,000 people have been killed in the war, yet there is noticeably less media coverage on Sudan’s conflict compared to other global issues. Why is this? Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School sophomore Emile Williamson confessed that he knows less about Sudan’s conflict than he does about those in Ukraine in Gaza. “I think it’s because the U.S. doesn’t have involvement in any side,” he said. Because the U.S. is not as directly involved, the conflict has fewer implications for American politics.
Sudan’s average rate of American interest over the last year, as reported by Google Trends, is four out of 100, compared to 12 out of 100 for Gaza and 27 out of 100 for Ukraine. Despite the apparent lack of interest in Sudan, Bethesda-Chevy Chase sophomore Brendan McCarthy said he has seen some information about it. “I’ve seen a lot of stuff on TikTok. It’s like there’s these two rebel forces, and they’re fighting over a gold mine, and there’s a lot of satellite images of the massacres going on there and there’s a lot of people dying,” he said. “Like, a lot.”
McCarthy says that though some of the sources on social media may not be the most reliable, he’s been seeing a major increase in coverage of the Sudanese civil war over the past month. This is probably because of the RSF’s recent offensive where they captured and unleashed a brutal massacre on el-Fasher, a city of 260,000, including a raid on a hospital in which they killed hundreds of patients.
Over the course of the past two years, over three million children have been reported to be malnourished, with hundreds of thousands dying as a result of the famine induced by the war. U.S. federal cuts to USAID will continue to exacerbate the situation. It should not take this much tragedy for the U.S. to take action and for the media to shine light on the crisis. While it may not be the direct fault of any Western countries, it is their responsibility to come together in times like these. As citizens of the world, we can help Sudan by bringing attention to what is happening and encouraging the funding of aid organizations. Most importantly, we can uplift the stories Sudan’s resilient people have bravely shared with us.
Written by Jaasim Zaman
Photos courtesy of Creative Commons